coachm - 1:46 am on Nov 4, 2009 (gmt 0)

coachm, the title is misleading, it should say "to compete with google ad manager". the synergy is the ability to offer backfilling with microsoft contextual ads within openx, just like how google ad manager uses adsense to backfill.

But, you can already use any ad network you want in openx (and admanager, for that matter). I'm trying to understand how this adds functionality to users.

The more complex the system and the more parties involved, the more likely it will fail often, or be inconsistent.

If there is an advantage to MS in terms of getting a "ready made" publisher network, I can pretty much guarantee that the quality of the existing network is not going to be very good. MS must have better ways to go if it has too many advertisers and not enough publishers (honestly, does anybody believe that's the "problem"?